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SOL Rising
Number 27, December 2002
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From The Chair: Onward and Upward
From The Collection Head: Opportunities Lost;
Opportunities Taken
Nothing But 'Net: Websites of Interest
The Vance Integral Edition
So Bad They're Good: Toby Hooper's Lifeforce
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From The Chair: Onward and Upward
A lot has happened since my last
column that is of importance to he Friends. I'll
start with what I and most of the executive consider to
be the single most important event since the collection moved to its
current location: the installation of The Merril Collection banner on the
front of the library building.
For those of you who haven't seen it yet, the banner is two
stories tall, overlooks College Street, and features the little green man
from Frank Kelly Freas' painting "Martians
Go Home." Most importantly; it says The Merril Collection of Science
Fiction across the top. We have been trying to get exterior signage for the
Collection ever since the building opened in 1995. It was a long and often
frustrating wait, but the end result is spectacular. Our thanks go out to Suzanna Birchwood of the Toronto Public Library's
Marketing & Communications staff.
Special thanks also go to Andrew Specht
for his tireless efforts to photograph the day-long installation of the
banner, which rook place an June 15 (it rained
mast of the day of the banner installation). Some of his photographs are
included in this issue. Andrew's an excellent photographer and the
executive is delighted that he’s able and willing to volunteer his
services on an ongoing basis. We've collected other photographs Andrew took
at various Friends of Merril events into a special center section for this
issue of SOL Rising.
Webmaster Jim Pattison has also completed an important project
since the last issue of SOL Rising. He has put all the back issues of SOL
Rising onto our website. As always, he did a great job, so if you
haven’t already seen them go to www.friendsofmerril.org for a
fascinating look through the Merril Collection's past.
And while on the subject of SOL Rising I'd like to welcome Sabrina
Fried, our new editor & designer. We have big plans for Sabrina and
we're confident that she'll be able to live up to the high standards set by
her predecessor, Liam Corkery Hustins.
Merril events these past
months included book launches by Scott Mackay, Ursula Pflug,
Karl Schroeder, and Emily Pohl-Weary, whose launch for Better To Have Loved The Life of Judith Merril was extremely
well received. Many of the members present had actually known Judy and
could appreciate the evening as a fond tribute to her memory. It was only
fitting that Emily's biography of her grandmother was launched in the
Collection that she founded.
Upcoming events include the annual Christmas Cream Tea, our second
Art :Show, set for January, the 7th annual
Fantastic Pulps Show & Sale on April 26, 2003, and the Annual General
Meeting on Saturday, May 3rd. The Merril will also be taking part in
Pandemonium, the annual gaming convention on the January 17 weekend. The
American Library Association will be having its annual convention in Toronto in June. Over 10,000
librarians will attend, and many of them are expected to tour the Merril
Collection and look at the displays. The pre-convention meeting of the Rare
Books & Manuscripts librarians will be held in the Lillian H. Smith
building and will help to publicize the Merril Collection in library
circles.
Due
to the unusual number of upcoming events, I'm asking now that anyone
interested in volunteering please contact Lorna Toolis
well in advance, so that we'll have enough bodies for all these occasions.
We will also need some people willing to put in a couple of hours work at
the TPL table at next year's Word on the Street. Due to miscommunication,
our new colour flyers were not made available to
the public at this year's event, and I want to make sure that this does not
happen again next year.
Jamie Fraser, Vice Chair
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From The Collection Head: Opportunities Lost; Opportunities Taken
As I write this, I have just finished talking to Mary McConnell, a
senior librarian from the University of Calgary, in charge of assessing and
dealing with the Gibson donation. For those of you who missed the coverage,
William (Robert) Gibson died when he was 92, and left his extensive
collection of science fiction and fantasy materials to the University of Calgary. His surviving family support his decision. The University of Calgary
is extremely pleased with the donation, and is trying to work out what kind
of commitment they must make to add these sf
materials to their library's special collections holdings. (Anyone
interested in more details should check the University of Calgary's web page at:
www.fp.ucalgary.ca/unicomm/news/gibson/release.html)
There has always been a keen interest in the idea of a science
fiction collection in the west by the members of the sf
community who live there. The University of Calgary's library management went en
masse to Calgary's science fiction convention,
Conversion, to try and get a better understanding of the sf community. They found it a major outreach
opportunity, meeting many people who were considering using the University
library system for the first time. The local academic community is also
evidencing keen interest in using the collection.
Library work is like an iceberg; what patrons see is the tip of
the iceberg, what library staff work on is the
larger, invisible part. So, we talked about the cost of staffing, for
reference and for cataloguing. We talked about funds for adding to the
collection and the nature of the materials they might want to consider
adding. We talked about funds for conservation, always a concern for
anyone who deals with older materials. We talked about space; most
librarians, like most sf readers, develop an
obsessive interest in how many books can be housed in a very small space.
We parted promising further contacts, exchanges of subject
authority headings, and possible exchanges of duplicate lists. It was a
good morning. As someone once said, "Louis, this looks like the start
of a beautiful friendship!"
It was sad to compare this meeting with a call I received from the
Winnipeg Free Press in the last week of October. The reporter wanted
comments on the forthcoming sale of the Stimpson
donation by the University of Winnipeg to Lloyd Currey,
the American bookdealer.
I knew Bob Stimpson. At a time when acne
was my major problem in life, he was one of a group of young collectors who
gathered on Sundays at Chester Cuthbert's house in Winnipeg and ordered books as a
collective, the better to receive a larger discount. We spent the afternoon
discussing books; which dealers were better, who collected what kind of
material, problems with the Post Office ...they were very good afternoons.
None of our elders ever had to worry about our becoming involved with
alcohol or drugs, we had neither the time nor the
interest, having effectively become hooked on books. None of us worried,
back then, about what would happen to our collections when we died; we were
all forty years away from that kind of concern.
Bob Stimpson willed his book collection
to the University of Winnipeg. It was probably a belt and
suspenders kind of precaution; he had no reason to expect to die in 1996,
he was only 47 years old. He had become a major collector over the years,
intending to start as a book dealer after his retirement from Manitoba
Hydro, as so many people do. While he had willed his book collection to the
University, he hadn't had time to discuss the donation with either the
library staff or University management. The University of Winnipeg library system has always had
a keen understanding of science fiction and a sound sf
collection. Unfortunately, the University has major debt problems. So, his
donation was stored in a nearby bus depot for six years and then sold to a
book dealer for distinctly less than its appraised value, rather than let
it continue to decay in storage.
It is very sad for everyone. For the University library, which was unable to avail itself of the opportunity. For
the students, who will not have access to the materials.
For Bob Stimpson, who tried very hard to do the
right thing. Libraries deserve and appreciate your
support. However, the moral I draw from this story is that surprising
organizations is not a good thing. Collective bodies are less flexible than
individuals. Their planning cycle is longer, and their budgets may be a
matter for (administrative) prayer.
Your institutions deserve and appreciate your support. In order to
donate intelligently, prepare in advance. The Merril Collection welcomes
donations and receives many every year -you will notice the list of benefactors
in the sidebar. It is easy to donate; all you have to do is pick up the
phone and talk to the friendly person on the other end of the line. Then
you can be sure, in your own mind, that the materials you love will be
housed and cherished and made available to other people who care about
them. You will provide for your spouses and your cats; it only makes sense
to do the same for your books.
Lorna Toolis
Contact
Information for Selected Libraries Around Ontario:
Please contact
libraries about their donation policies before sending in a donation.
Toronto/GTA:
Outside
GTA:
- Carleton University (613) 520-7400, ext.
8140, library_circulation@carleton.ca
- Ottawa Public Libraries Development Office (613)
236-0302
- University
of Waterloo
Department of Special Collections (519) 888-4567
- University of Western Ontario (519) 661-3162
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Nothing But ‘Net:
Websites Of Interest
Every so often I stumble across a website so fascinating
that I immediately want to send the URL to everyone in my address book. The
Pitch Drop Experiment, located at www.physics.uq.edu.au/pitchdrop/pitchdrop.shtml,
is a perfect example. In 1927, Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, decided to perform an experiment
to demonstrate unusual properties of a common substance. He chose pitch, a
tar-like material used to seal joints in the hulls of ships. Pitch exhibits
some of the properties of fluids, even though it is quite brittle at normal
room temperatures. Prof. Parnell took some pitch, heated it and poured it
into a funnel that was sealed at the bottom. After letting the pitch settle
for three years (!), he cut the seal, allowing the pitch to drip into the
beaker below. The first drop fell eight years later, in December 1938, and
drops have been falling at more-or-less regular intervals ever since. The
most recent—the 8th—fell in November 2000. The
website contains a description of the experiment, and a link to a webcam that provides a live video image of the funnel
and beaker, which are currently in a display case in the foyer of the
university's physics building. If you check out the video feed at the right
time of day—taking into account the 14-hour time difference between
Toronto and Brisbane—you can see students walking by in the
background. Because the building is now air-conditioned, the average
temperature of the pitch is lower than it was when Parnell started the
experiment. As a result, the interval between drops is increasing, so I'll
make a note to check back in on this sometime in, say, 2010.
I used to collect laser videodiscs, and many of my favourite discs were Japanese imports. I turned to
Japanese discs simply because the format was much more popular there than
it ever was here, and there were a lot of cool titles released in Japan that never saw the light of
day in North
America.
A particular specialty of Japanese home video companies was boxed sets
containing consecutive episodes of a TV series, often an entire season at a
time. The obsolescence of the videodisc format compelled me to eventually
sell off most of my collection, but one thing I kept was my shelf of
imported X-Files sets containing
the first seven seasons of Chris Carter's paranoid masterpiece. I never
thought I'd see their like on DVD. Hey, what did I know? DVD has become so
popular so fast that the studios are releasing everything they can to keep
up with the demand. Since most studios have vast libraries of old TV shows, it was only a matter of time before someone put two
and two together. Some of the first series to appear on DVD were science
fiction classics like The Twilight
Zone, the original Star Trek
and (yes!) The X-Files, but
recent months have also seen the release of more mainstream fate: both
dramas (Law And Order) and
sitcoms (The Mary Tyler Moore Show).
In fact, the flood of TV material on DVD is now so constant that there's a
website devoted solely to tracking and reviewing new releases. It's called TV Shows On DVD, and it's located at
www.tvshowsondvd.com. You can
browse the release schedule to see what's coming in the next few months, or
look up your favourite series to see what's already
available, and whether it's worth picking up. SF series continue to set the
pace, with complete runs of Babylon 5,
Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Farscape, The Outer Limits, The Prisoner, Space
1999, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stargate SG-1,
Twin Peaks, and many more either
available now, or in the works. Some might question the wisdom of buying
something you can watch off the air more-or-less far free, but once you
experience Mulder and Scully in anamorphic
widescreen with Dolby Digital sound, a crystal clear picture and no
commercials, there's no turning back.
I also used to collect comic books. As with
videodiscs, the bulk of my collection was sold long ago, but thanks to Nick
Simon's Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index, www.samcci.comics.org I can
revisit the comics I used to own, and drool over the ones I always wanted
but could never afford. The goal of the site is simple: display an image of
the cover of every Marvel comic book published during the “Silver
Age”. This is the period that began with the publication of Fantastic Four #1 (dated November 1961) and ended
approximately ten years later, by which time Stan Lee had stopped writing
most of Marvel's output. The site also has incomplete runs of covers for
titles published prior to FF #1 that became important in the Silver
Age: comics like Tales To Astonish,
Journey Into Mystery and the suggestively-titled Amazing Adult Fantasy. You can browse the covers by title or by
publication date, so you can see which issue of Daredevil came out the same month as your favourite
issue of Spider-Man. (Did you
know that the first issues of The
Avengers and The X-Men were
both published in the same month? It's true —giants did walk the
earth in those days.) The images have been collected from a number of
different sources, so their size and quality varies considerably. It should
also be noted that the design of the site is probably more cluttered than
it needs to be. But if the words "It's clobbering time!" bring a
smile to your face, then this one is a must-see.
Jim Pattison
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Imagine a shelf in your bookcase filled with a matching
set of elegantly designed books containing the complete works of your favourite author. While such sets are common for major
writers like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, they are virtually unknown in
the field of science fiction. But for fans of Jack Vance, such a set,
dubbed the Vance Integral Edition
(or VIE for short) is about to become a reality. The fact that these books
are being published for a writer known primarily for his science fiction is
significant in its own right, but what really distinguishes the 44‑volume
VIE is the manner in which it is being produced
Vance began publishing stories in sf
magazines in 1945. His first book, The
Dying Earth, followed in 1950. Five decades later, now in his mid‑eighties,
he is still writing. He is the author of a large and varied body of work
that includes not just science fiction and fantasy, but also mysteries. But
despite a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award and an SFWA Grand Master
Award, not to mention the praise of many writers who cite Vance as a major
influence, much of his work is now out of print.
In early 1999, Paul Rhoads, an American artist living
in France, was visiting Jack Vance and
his wife Norma at their home in California. While there, Rhoads saw a
copy of a German‑language edition of one of Vance's novels published
by Edition Andres Irle, a one‑man small
press based in Germany. Impressed by the simple
elegance of the book, Rhoads wondered about the possibility of publishing
Vance's complete works in English in a similar format. With the aid of the
author's son John, some inquiries were made. Initial responses indicated
that such a set would not be economically feasible: the anticipated sales
would not be high enough to offset the production costs. Rhoads—who
knew nothing about publishing, and who had never used a computer—conceived
the idea of publishing the books as a non‑profit venture. If all of
the production work was done on a volunteer basis by fans of Vance's work,
then the books could be sold to subscribers for the cost of printing and
binding alone. In the summer of 1999, Mike Berro,
a fan and collector, published Rhoads' call for volunteers on his Jack
Vance website. The response was immediate and overwhelming: the Vance
Integral Edition was born. (Technically speaking, the term Vance Integral Edition refers to
both the books themselves, and the non‑profit corporation set up to
publish them.)
The first step in the project was to get all of
Vance's stories and novels into a computerized form. In most cases, this
meant scanning a copy of the text from a book or magazine. Although this
sounds easy, it can in fact be quite difficult. Scanning text that was
originally printed on cheap paper that is now yellowing with age is equal
parts art and science. Much trial and error was required to perfect a
process that guarantees a "clean" copy of the text, with no
errors introduced by the scanning process.
Once the text was computerized, the next step was to
make sure that it was correct. Careful proofreading was required to
identify, and remove the typos, spelling mistakes and other flaws that
existed in the original publications used for scanning. Just as important
was the goal of publishing Vance's preferred version of each text. This too
turned out to be easier said than done. Early on, it was discovered that
there are variations in the texts for many of Vance's publications. In
cases where the manuscript still exists, differences can be seen between
what Vance wrote and what was originally published. Comparing subsequent
editions and printings will often reveal further variants—some of
them quite extensive. These differences can be the result of changes made
by Vance himself (good), changes made by an editor with or without Vance's
knowledge (maybe good, maybe bad), or simply errors introduced during the
production of a particular publication (bad). Determining the correct text
for each story or novel requires a fair bit of literary detective work.
This is especially true if the manuscript has been lost. In many cases,
the text that will be published by the VIE has been constructed (or
reconstructed) from a painstaking comparison between two or more different
versions of the story in question. A major resource for this part of the
project, called “textual integrity”, is the Mugar
Memorial Library in Boston, which contains a large
archive of Vance's papers and surviving manuscripts. An even more important
resource is Norma Vance, who has served as her husband's assistant for many
years, and whose knowledge of his work is second to none.
My personal involvement with the VIE began in the
spring of 2001. After lurking on the project's website www.vanceintegral.com for a number
of months, I decided to take the plunge and become both a subscriber and
volunteer. By that point, the first corrected texts were just beginning to
emerge from the textual integrity process, and were ready for composition.
Additional proofreading, called post‑proofing, was then required to
make sure that no errors were introduced during the composition stage. While
post‑proofing is intended to identify formatting or composition
errors (such as improper use of italics), any type of error is fair game.
Post‑proofing is really the VIE's last line
of defense: anything missed by a post‑proofing team will probably end
up in the published books. To date, I have completed over a dozen post-proofing
assignments, on texts ranging from a six‑page short story to a 533-page
novel. This makes me a member of an international team of several hundred
volunteers who have contributed to the VIE. Our efforts are made possible
through the widespread availability of both relatively inexpensive personal
computers and the Internet itself. Although the resulting set of books will
hopefully reflect the refined elegance of an earlier era, the VIE is truly
a product of the modern age. Even a few years ago, with the technology
available at the time, a project of this scope simply would not have been
practical.
An early supporter of the VIE was Paul Allen, fine of
the founders of Microsoft, and a long‑time fan of Vance's work. Since
one of the goals of the project is to raise Vance's literary profile,
getting sets of the books into public libraries as well as private
collections is an important part of the process. As a result, Allen's
charitable foundation made a grant of $50,000 (US) to the VIE for the
purpose of purchasing sets to be donated to libraries throughout the
English‑speaking world. When a request for suggested recipients of
these donated sets was made, I submitted a nomination on behalf of the
Merril Collection. The initial response to the nomination was positive.
While the final list of recipient libraries has yet to be announced, it
seems likely that the Merril Collection will be one of them.
The current schedule calls for the publication of the
first wave of VIE texts ‑ 22 volumes ‑ in early 2003, with the
remaining books following sometime in late 2003 or early 2004. Dedicated
volunteers around the world have already committed tens of thousands of
hours to the project, with many more to come. This level of commitment is a
testament to Vance’s achievements as a writer. The 44 volumes of the
VIE will serve as a lasting reminder of those achievements, and will form
an important part of the Merril Collection in years to come.
Jim Pattison
Postscript: The Merril Collection received its copies
of the 22 volumes comprising Wave 1 of the Vance Integral Edition in May, 2003.
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An occasional look at sf
movies that bombed at the box office despite big budgets and pretensions to
grandeur ‑ but took on new lives as “cult” films.
Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce: A masterpiece,
except for the writing, directing and acting
After his success with Poltergeist, great things were expected of director Tobe Hooper.
He was handed a huge budget and a free directorial hand for his next
project, a film of Colin Wilson's science fiction novel The Space Vampires. The resulting
film, Lifeforce,
featured a multinational cast, spaceship effects right out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, crowds of
zombies running amok while London burns, and beautiful naked
space vampiress. Planned as a big bucks
blockbuster, it lasted about a
week in theatres. Reviews were almost unanimously rotten, the author of the
book called the movie “perhaps the worst movie ever made,” and
movie viewers stayed away in droves. But now, more than 15 years later, ask
around and vou’ll hear people praising the
movie, even calling it their favourite film. Why?
Well, the phrase “guilty pleasure” seems to pop up often.
Many films reach “cult” status by being “so
bad they're good.” This stature can be reached in two ways. The first
is by being just plain inept: a bad script, bad acting, no budget, or all
of the above. The second way is to start off with a talented cast, a good
book, scads of money, the intention to make a blockbuster, and to have
everything go badly astray. Lists of titles in both categories can be
rhymed off. For instance, anything by the incomparable Ed Wood Jr. would
fall into the first category. Movies such as Showgirls, Glitter
and Lifeforce fall firmly into the latter
category. The actors, a stellar group of distinguished British and American
thespians, seem to be in two different movies—the Brits understated
and quiet, the Americans running around chewing the scenery—but all
of them delivering surprisingly lousy performances.
The bags of money, spent on
the film all went to special effects (including an unintentionally
hilarious scene in which Star Trek's Patrick Stewart
disintegrates into a blob of blood in a military helicopter), and this is
one of the first priorities to qualify a movie for “so bad it's good”
status. A look on the website “Film Score: The Online Magazine of
Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation” gives same further
indications. "It's a ‘50s ‘B’ sci‑fi movie blown
up to epic proportions, and ... it's played so totally straight it
threatens to veer into self‑parody throughout," A reviewer for
the web site, Andy Dursin, writes, "London
is in flames as the population turns into zombies! Buildings blow up right
and left! Big special effects fill the screen! Mathilda
(the space vampiress) still walks around naked!
The dialogue is even dumber than before! ... I think I've made it clear by now why this film holds
such entertainment value for those of us who treasure this
sort of thing."
And that's the crux of it ‑ it's a guilty
pleasure, so bad it's good. A masterpiece‑except for the writing,
directing and acting.
Next issue: Battlefield
Earth: What were they thinking?
Ted Brown
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